I was lucky enough to attend the press launch today at the magnificent Leighton House Museum, a fitting venue filled with aesthetic artefacts in the house of one of the period’s greatest artists, Frederic Lord Leighton.

The aesthetic movement centres on “art as art’s sake”, in other words: creating art for its beauty, not for symbolism or anecdotes.

“The Aesthetic Movement was born out of a cacophony of conflicting ideas, theories and experiments in art. Perhaps the one clear message was that people hoped to escape from what was seen to be the ugliness and increasing commerciality of the 1860s to 1870s.”

He added: “The artists and designers that we feature in the exhibition all tried in their various ways to completely revolutionise the fields in which they work – whether it’s painting, sculpture or the creation of furniture and the decoration of houses.”